Lydia Martin
Lydia Martin is a main character and the current female lead of Teen Wolf. She is the daughter of Natalie Martin and Mr. Martin, and the granddaughter of Lorraine Martin and her wife Maddy. When first introduced, Lydia could be as described as a shallow, vain, mean-girl who played dumb to hide just how smart she really was. However, after she began to become friends with Allison Argent, Scott McCall, and Stiles Stilinski, Lydia began to shed this persona and has since grown into a brave, compassionate person who genuinely enjoys helping people. At the end of Season One, Lydia was attacked and bitten by then-Alpha Peter Hale, but in a shocking turn of events, she neither died nor turned into a werewolf. However, she began to hear voices, go into fugue states similar to sleepwalking, and have terrifying hallucinations about Peter-- unbeknownst to her, Peter's attack had activated her latent Banshee abilities she had inherited from her grandmother. It was eventually revealed that his attack against her also allowed his spirit to live in her mind, affording him a connection with Lydia that he could use to manipulate her into resurrecting him with a special ritual on the Worm Moon. Even after he had vacated her consciousness, Lydia began to be drawn to dead bodies in Beacon Hills, particularly those killed by the supernatural, which steadily began to worry her. It was eventually revealed to her by Jennifer Blake that Lydia was, in fact, a Banshee, also known as the Wailing Woman, a harbinger of death. Since this revelation, Lydia has struggled to learn the full scope of her powers and how to use them, often lamenting the fact that her powers were passive and spontaneous, unlike the comparatively easier-to-control powers of werecreatures that could be used actively and defensively. Despite her frustrations, Lydia's ability to sense imminent death has given the pack numerous advantages in battles, though very few people give her credit for just how powerful she is. Recently, due to injuries sustained when Theo Raeken entered her mind to sense her memories, Lydia became temporarily catatonic, causing her to be admitted into the supernatural ward of Eichen House. While there, Dr. Gabriel Valack performed trephination on her, which amplified her abilities to the point that she has extra-sensory perception. It was confirmed by Alan Deaton in Amplification that Lydia is an exceptionally powerful Banshee, even despite the fact that Lydia doesn't know the full extent of her powers yet, which is likely at least part of why Valack was so determined to use her to figure out the identity of the Beast of Gevaudan. As of Lie Ability, Lydia has been rescued from Eichen House and is back with her loved ones, and has returned to her original power level after Deaton reversed the trephination with mistletoe paste. However, thanks to Meredith Walker, a fellow Banshee and a friend and ally of Lydia and the McCall Pack, Lydia has since learned how to use her voice as an offensive weapon, allowing her to channel the power of her voice through her hands to create concussive blasts that can forcefully throw a grown person backward away from her. This combined with her newly-learned close-quarters combat skills, taught to her by Jordan Parrish, has given her the ability to better defend herself from threats even if the pack is not around to assist her. Lydia is a member of the Martin Family and the McCall Pack. Early Life Lydia has attended school with Scott McCall and Stiles Stilinski for most of her life, judging by Stiles' comments that he has had a crush on her since the third grade ( ) and at some point, her IQ was tested, and she rated a genius-level score of 170. ( ) When she was young, she was very close to her paternal grandmother Lorraine, with whom she read many books. Her favorite was The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, which she loved so much that she insisted she be called Ariel, a trait Lorraine found adorable. ( ) When Lydia was in elementary school, her grandmother was sent to Eichen House; while Lydia's parents were sure that Lorraine was mentally ill, in reality, she was a Banshee who could hear voices and other sounds on a level of the universe no one else could perceive and experience almost psychic-esque premonitions. ( ) One day, Lorraine performed trephination on herself while in the bathtub at Eichen House, which caused Natalie to be called to help deal with it. Though Lydia was told to stay in the car, she eventually got bored and followed her mother in, where she found Lorraine surrounded by a pool of blood. Lorraine saw her in the doorway and stated, "They're coming, Lydia. They're coming for all of us," but for some yet-unexplained reason, Lydia repressed the memory until she read Gabriel Valack's novel The Dread Doctors, which was intended to trigger suppressed memories, specifically those that were suppressed by the Dread Doctors themselves. ( ) Throughout Teen Wolf |-|Season 1= |-|Season 2= |-|Season 3A= |-|Season 3B= |-|Season 4= |-|Season 5A= |-|Season 5B= |-|Season 6= TBA Personality At the beginning of the series, Lydia put on an act of being the vain, shallow, ditzy mean-girl despite having an IQ higher than anyone at BHHS, and she and her then-boyfriend Jackson ruled as the most popular kids at school. However, upon meeting Allison and befriending Scott and Stiles, Lydia's fake persona began to fade away, revealing the true Lydia underneath-- one who was kind, loyal, extremely intelligent (and unafraid to show it), and determined to help people however she can. She is especially talented at math, physics, and languages, having taught herself both Archaic and Classical Latin as well as being somewhat fluent in French and Spanish, and once insisting that she would one day win the Fields Medal in mathematics as a result of inventing a new mathematical theorem. However, being bitten and attacked by Peter Hale not only triggered her latent Banshee abilities, which likely would not have manifested until age eighteen otherwise, but also allowed him to possess her mind long enough to manipulate her into resurrecting him with a ritual involving the full moon. During this time, Lydia experienced fugue states, hallucinations, nightmares, and other terrifying symptoms that severely decreased her state of mind along with her social status at school. Even after Peter had left her consciousness, she was still regularly traumatized by the dead bodies she was unconsciously drawn to due to her nature as a harbinger of death. However, the McCall Pack began to give her the support she desperately needed, and once she started to get a handle on her new life, Lydia made it her mission to do good whenever she can, particularly when it involves teenage girls like herself who are struggling just like she was, such as Tracy Stewart and Sydney. Physical Appearance Lydia is a beautiful thin and petite woman with very pale skin, green eyes, and long strawberry-blonde hair. Her style leans toward the very feminine, and she is nearly always seen wearing dresses or pencil skirts with dressy blouses and high heels or booties. However, due to Lydia's developing fighting skills, she has recently started to wear shorts and jeans more often than dresses and skirts due to the fact that they're more practical, given that she may need to fight at any moment; despite this fact, she still prefers to wear boots rather than sneakers. She typically wears her hair at least partially pulled away from her face, and has a tendency to braid it up in a milkmaid style. She likes to keep her eye makeup to a minimum in favor of wearing bold colored lipstick, and occasionally wears thin chain necklaces or simple rings. Powers and Abilities As a Banshee, Lydia has a wide range of supernatural powers that can be used for various effects. Due to the trephination performed on her by Valack, she has gained new powers in addition to having some of her preexisting powers amplified, but this has since been reversed by Alan Deaton by filling the hole in her head with mistletoe. Lydia also has many human abilities and skills that benefit her life in the supernatural world, as well as her pack as a whole. Powers * Harbinger of Death Sense: As a Banshee, Lydia can sense when someone has died or is about to die. This is usually accompanied by a trance-like state that draws her to those who are dead or near-death, though with practice, she has gotten better at being aware of what she's doing when this happens. During her first-ever banshee fugue state, she walked naked from the hospital to the Hale House ruins, where Peter had been killed and buried, and was in the woods for nearly two whole days. * Premonitions: As a Banshee, Lydia's ears are naturally tuned to levels of the universe that only she (and other Banshees) can hear, which gives her the ability to receive auditory premonitions about the person whose death she's sensing. This allows her to discern how a person will die, and what caused the event in the first place. For example, Lydia was able to foresee Scott's impending death after she had an auditory premonition involving wolves growling and fighting each other. As Lydia's powers have grown, her premonitions have gone from being purely auditory to also being visual as well, which makes it easier for Lydia to figure out what her Banshee instincts are telling her. This power became even more heightened during the brief period that Valack performed trephination on her skull in Season 5. However, Lydia's premonitions are not always literal and can often be up for interpretation, and she often doesn't receive every single detail of what is about to happen during the premonition. For example, her premonition of the Desert Wolf killing Malia showed Malia hiding in her former coyote den while the Desert Wolf approached her, but in reality, their battle was at Fort Jewett. * Sound Divination: As a Banshee with heightened hearing abilities, Lydia can use sound vibrations to divine for more information regarding those whose deaths she is foretelling. For example, Lydia was able to figure out that Stiles was dreaming about Eichen House by plucking strings of yarn tied to his clue board and listening to the vibrations, and got a general (albeit vague) sense of Derek's condition by listening to his screams through the sound of bullet casings hitting a metal tabletop. Additionally, the blank record in her grandmother's sound-proofed study allowed her to divine that the first code word for the Deadpool list was "Allison." * Harbinger Connection: As a Banshee, Lydia has a somewhat psychic connection to other Banshees, which she can use to communicate with them, even if they are miles away from her. However, this is an ability that must be consciously activated, and as a result, Lydia is still learning the full scope of how to use this power. She has been able to use this connection to communicate with fellow Banshee Meredith Walker, allowing her to pass messages along to her pack when Lydia was held captive by the Nogitsune, and giving Meredith the opportunity to help Lydia use her Banshee wail as a weapon while she was catatonic. Additionally, she seems to have a similar connection with Hellhounds (specifically Jordan Parrish), since they are also harbingers of death; this allows her to warn Jordan when there are bodies for him to take to the Nemeton, though neither of them seem to be fully aware of this connection and how it works. * Banshee Wail: As a Banshee, Lydia has a powerful voice that can be used to produce various effects. Her wail is most often used as a warning of someone's impending death, or as a signal that someone has just died, and in this kind of case, Lydia usually wails after she has found a dead body in a fugue state. This type of wail was used when she was unconsciously drawn to Derek's loft when it was believed that he was going to die. Her scream can also be used to clear ambient noises from her auditory channels so that she can focus her attention on the specific sounds that she needs to hear. Her wail can be used in an active or offensive manner as well; when a Banshee wail is given focus and direction, it can shatter bulletproof glass, overload electronics, burst eardrums, and create concussive blasts that can throw a full-grown man across a room. Lydia used this ability during her first attempt to break out of Eichen House. She can also use her hands to guide her voice toward her target, which gives her greater control over where the power is focused. While her abilities were amplified by trephination, Lydia's scream was powerful enough to shatter Gabriel Valack's skull, though it is unknown if she retains her scream at this powerful of a level now that the effects of the trephination have been reversed. * Supernatural Immunity: As a Banshee, Lydia is immune to the effects of many supernatural phenomenon. A bite from an Alpha Werewolf will neither kill her nor turn her, provided the wound isn't fatal, as evidenced when Peter bit her in Season 1 and it did nothing but activate her latent Banshee abilities. Likewise, Kanima venom will not paralyze her or otherwise have an effect on her at all, which was proven when she unknowingly ate a piece of rock candy covered in Jackson's venom and suffered no negative consequences whatsoever, as well as when Tracy Stewart cut Lydia with her Kanima tail before Kira cut it off with her katana. Additionally, she can wield rowan wood and mountain ash like any normal human and is unaffected by barriers made of it, which would weaken and trap any other supernatural creature. Former Powers * Extrasensory Perception: After having a hole drilled into her skull behind her ear (a procedure known as trephination) by Dr. Valack, Lydia's supernatural abilities were temporarily heightened to such a powerful degree that she could have full sensory visions of what she's seeking, though they do have to have at least some connection to death. However, this was actually very painful to her, because she heard the screams of every dying person in the world all at once, which caused her to Banshee wail multiple times, causing shattered windows, cracked mirrors, crumbling walls, and even bursting one of Stiles Stilinski's eardrums, as well as blowing off half of Valack's skull with her scream. ** Retrocognition: Lydia was able to use ESP to go back to the night that Theo let his sister die through a highly realistic vision. In the vision, Lydia walked through the creek where his sister died until she finally found her, allowing her to look at the young girl's chest and find that her heart was removed. These visions are like walking through a movie, where she can pause and focus on specific things in minute detail, even despite the fact that she never experienced this event when it happened. ** Clairvoyance: Lydia was able to see a vision of Theo and his Chimera Pack invading Eichen House to come capture her in the present, despite the fact that she was not physically anywhere near them at the time. Abilities * Genius-Level Intelligence: Lydia has an IQ of 170, which is well above genius level. Between how quickly she can learn new skills and her craving for knowledge, Lydia possesses dearth of knowledge on a wide range of topics including mathematics, chemistry, physics, medicine, psychology, history, mythology, and foreign languages, which has helped the pack on numerous occasions. For this reason, she is often teamed-up with Stiles in order to investigate various supernatural crimes, pairing her immense academic knowledge with Stiles' advanced understanding of law enforcement and detective work. * Skilled Close-Quarters Combatant: Lydia was trained by Jordan Parrish, a former Army EOD technician, to fight in close-quarters combat, and even Meredith insisted that Lydia learned much more than normal people would in much less time. In flash-forwards in Season 5, Lydia was shown using this ability to fight her way out of Eichen House, and would have succeeded had she not been overpowered by a half-dozen guards with cattle-prod tasers.}} Weaknesses * Mortality: Despite being a Banshee, Lydia is still technically human and has no supernatural healing ability; for that reason, she is vulnerable to any physical illness or injury as any other mundane person would be, including fatal ones. * Loud Noises: As a Banshee with a very heightened sense of hearing, Lydia is vulnerable to very loud noises. For example, Meredith's banshee wail once caused Lydia to start bleeding from her ears because the pitch was literally ear-piercing to her. * Psychological Turmoil: Being a Banshee is often a very traumatizing experience, as she is literally surrounded by death, whether it's because she's predicting it, witnessing it, or finding a body after they've been killed. This can have understandable negative effects on Lydia's psyche. * Effects of Trephination: (Formerly) According to Alan Deaton, when trephination is performed on Banshees, they are completely overwhelmed by the screams and sensations of every single person in the world who is currently dying. Their highly amplified powers will eventually become so difficult for the Banshee to control that they will foresee their own death before wailing loudly and dying. Because Lydia had a hole drilled in her head in this manner, she was affected by the same consequences, though this was eventually reversed by Deaton by plugging up the trephination hole with a paste made of mistletoe, a known curative herb in the Druid arts. Etymology *'Lydia': Lydia is a feminine given name with origins in English, German, Finnish, Biblical Latin and Greek, and Old Slavic. In Greek, Lydia means "from Lydia" due to its status as a region on the west coast of Asia Minor (which is now modern-day Turkey). In the New Testament, Lydia was the name of a woman, Lydia of Thyatira, who was converted to Christianity by Saint Paul. In the modern era, the name has been in use since the Protestant Reformation, and it is a variant of the German, Dutch, and Scandinavian name Adelheid, from which the name Allison and its variants are also derived, making it an appropriate name choice for Lydia Martin, given the close sisterly bond between Lydia and Allison Argent. **Variants of the name Lydia in other languages include: Lidiya (Bulgarian, Russian); Lídia (Catalan, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish); Lidija (Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, Slovene); Lýdie (Czech, French); Lilla (Hungarian); Lidka (Polish); Lidochka (Russian); Lýdia (Slovak). *'Martin': Martin is an English, French, German, and Czech surname derived from the Roman name Martinus, which was derived from Martis, the genitive case of Mars, the Roman god of war. It could also be a shortened form of the name St. Martin, the name of a once-great family in Lothian, Scotland. Variants of the name in other languages include: Martinus (Ancient Roman, Dutch); Mattin, Matxin (Basque); Martí (Catalan); Marten, Martijn, Tijn (Dutch); Máirtín (Irish); Martino, Tino (Italian); Martynes (Lithuanian); Marcin (Polish); Martim, Martinho (Portuguese); Martín (Spanish); Martyn (Ukrainian, Welsh). Trivia * Lydia was listed on the Deadpool hit-list for $20 million, making her the second-highest valued target on the list after Scott McCall, who was valued at $25 million. * Lydia has a small poodle named Prada. * Lydia has technically kissed the most characters of any other character on the show: Jackson, Scott, Aiden, Stiles, and Jordan. However, she has only kissed Scott and Stiles on one single occasion each, and has only kissed Jordan in hallucinations/visions. * According to Jeff Davis in interviews, Lydia will be one of the most important players in Season 5, likely due to her amplified powers and her ability to foresee all of the impending deaths. * Alan Deaton described Lydia as an "exceptionally powerful" Banshee in Amplification, suggesting that she may be the strongest of the three Banshees introduced in the series thus far. Relationships *Jackson and Lydia (Exes, Friends) *Aiden and Lydia (Exes, Friends) *Jordan and Lydia (Close Friends, Supernaturally Connected) *Stiles and Lydia (Best Friends, Packmates) *Allison and Lydia (Best Friends, Sisterly Bond, Packmates) *Lydia and Malia (Close Friends, Packmates) *Kira and Lydia (Close Friends, Packmates) *Lydia and Scott (Close Friends, Packmates) *Lydia and Liam (Friends, Packmates) *Lydia and Mason (Friends, Packmates) *Lydia and Theo (Enemies) *Derek and Lydia (Former Frenemies, Allies) *Lydia and Tracy (Former Friends, Frenemies) *Lydia and Natalie (Mother/Daughter) *Deaton and Lydia (Allies, Packmates) *Lydia and Sheriff (Allies) *Chris and Lydia (Allies) *Lydia and Melissa (Allies) *Lydia and Sydney (Friends) *Cora and Lydia (Allies) *Danny and Lydia (Friends) *Kira, Malia and Lydia (Close Friends, Packmates) Gallery 1x02_Lydia_and_Scott.jpg S1_Lydia.jpg 2x02_Lydia_at_ice_rink.jpg S2_Lydia_and_Jackson.png Lydia_in_the_woods.jpg Lydia_crying.jpg 2x12_Lydia_and_kanima_Jackson.jpg S2_Lydia_someonehelpme.jpg Teen-Wolf-season-2-Lydia-Martin.jpg S3_Lydia_at_rave.jpg S3_Lydia_close_up_scream.jpeg 3x06_Lydia_listening.jpg 3x06_Lydia_sees_Darach.png Lydia_staring.png Teen-Wolf-Lydia-Martin.jpg 3x13_Isaac_saves_Lydia.jpg 3x13_Lydia_hearing.png 4x02_Lydia_and_Kira.png 4x03_Lydia_and_Malia.png 501_Lydia_escaping.jpeg 5x04_Lydia_smurk.jpg 5x09_Lydia.png Lydia_dying.png S5_Lydia_flashback.jpg Teen_Wolf_Season_5_Episode_11_The_Last_Chimera_Claw_Marks_in_Lydia's_Neck.jpg Teen_Wolf_Season_5_Episode_11_The_Last_Chimera_Lydia_at_The_Bridge.png Teen_Wolf_Season_5_Episode_11_The_Last_Chimera_Lydia_Has_a_Hole_in_Her_Head.png Teen_Wolf_Season_5_Episode_12_Damnatio_Memoriae_Lydia's_out_of_Body_Experience.png Teen_Wolf_Season_5_Episode_14_The_Sword_and_the_Spirit_Meredith_pushes_Lydia.png Teen_Wolf_Season_5_Episode_16_Lie_Ability_Lydia_in_pain.png Teen_Wolf_Season_5_Episode_16_Lie_Ability_Lydia_screaming.png Teen_Wolf_Season_5_Episode_19_The_Beast_of_Beacon_Hills_Lydia_dead.png Category:Characters Category:Main Characters Category:Female Characters Category:Banshees Category:McCall Pack Category:Humans Category:Martin Family Category:Eichen House Patients Category:Deadpool Targets Category:Supernatural Creatures Category:Season 1 Characters Category:Season 2 Characters Category:Season 3 Characters Category:Season 4 Characters Category:Season 5 Characters Category:Protagonists Category:Season 6 Characters Category:Alive Characters